The latest in Ivan Hewett’s 50-part series on short works by the world’s
greatest composers

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There’s a story about how modern music arose, which goes something like this. By the end of the 19th century, the language of classical music was falling apart. As its harmonies grew richer, and the kinds of feelings they embodied more peculiar, so the grammar that once held the chords together weakened.

At the same time, classical music was being assailed from outside. Music from the margins – Spain, India, China – was starting to penetrate Europe. Jazz soon followed them. Faced with the threat of disorder, many composers built barricades. They erected new musical systems and grammars, or took refuge in tradition. And they fortified their strange music with a torrent of polemical essays and manifestos.

Leoš Janácek stood apart from that. This short, fiery, impetuous man burst onto the international scene in the 1920s, when he was already in his sixties. By then he’d toiled away in provincial Brno for decades, and had almost given up hope of being recognised by the wider world. The Prague premiere of his opera Jenůfa in 1916 banished all his accumulated self-doubt, and in his final 12 years came an amazing late flowering. Five operas, a vast Mass setting, and great orchestral and chamber works flowed from him.

Impetuous though he was, and naive in matters of the heart, Janáček was no naïf in music. He actually wrote quite a few theoretical works. But unlike those other systematisers, Janáček’s thoughts about music were rooted in reality. He was interested in music as it actually was, not as it ought to be.

Above all, he loved the music of his native Bohemia. He would loiter in the streets of Brno, noting down the rhythms and melodic contours of people’s speech. And when the time came to compose his operas, he would ransack these notebooks for the appropriate phrase, so that his characters’ utterances would have the stamp of truth.

This little piano piece is haunted by the shrieking sound of an owl, which in Slavic countries is a portent of death. It was written before Janáček’s late flowering, but it has the hallmarks of his best pieces in miniature: blazing emotional vividness and a perfect fusion of the inherited language of classical music with his self-created, folk-like world.

LISTENING POINTS

00.00 A desperate outcry, as if the owl has acquired human powers of utterance. It leaves behind an unstable form of the minor chord, which turns imperceptibly into a tremolando, or trembling effect. Through this comes a two-note call, sounding from far away, as if through trees. The loud call comes again, at 00.17.

00.33 The call is answered by a hymn-like phrase, sounding so like Schubert it could almost be a quotation – apart from the abrupt, eager way the phrase is rounded off at 00.39, which is pure Janáček. The way the second part of the phrase resolves first one way, at 00.50, and then another, at 00.58, is even more like Schubert.

1.03 That cry returns, inexplicable and inconsolable.

1.25 Now the hymn-like idea returns, but this time in a full-blooded, affirmative way, as if the cry has been overcome.

1.41 But it hasn’t. From here the music follows the pattern of the first minute and a half, with fluttering ornaments added to the hymn-like idea. The rhythm of these flutterings comes from that opening cry, as if one idea is invading the other.

3.20 The closing of the hymn is made more intense, as if to say, this really is the end now.

3.42 But that cry returns, and this time receives no answer.

FURTHER LISTENING

Mládí, third movement

How apt that a man once described as “the eternally young old man’’ should write a piece called Mládí (Youth), in his 70th year. Janáček had been asked to provide some notes for a projected biography, and this stirred up memories of his school days at the Augustinian monastery near Brno. He pictured them in this suite for wind quintet (played by the usual combination of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, plus a bass clarinet). The third movement takes its perky little piccolo from an earlier piece by Janáček called the March of the Blue Boys. Notice how the music slips from modal folksiness to an old-fashioned contrasting passage at 00.52, full of Wagnerian melodic turns. Janáček was never dogmatic in his modernism.

Sinfonietta, first movement

This opening movement of the Sinfonietta, composed in 1926, is Janáček’s contribution to the genre of the triumphal opening fanfare. It was written to open a gymnastics competition, but actually dedicated to the Czech armed forces, and what resounds through all that brassy triumph is Janáček’s pride at the emergence of the new Czech nation, at the end of the First World War. The rhythm of that constantly repeated phrase, with its two short ending notes, must surely be influenced by Czech speech rhythms. It sounds attractively odd at first, but it soon seems archetypal, as if we’ve always known it. Janáček reminds me of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer: he takes the local and makes it seem universal.

Agnus Dei from Glagolitic Mass

Janáček was a declared atheist, yet some kind of belief surely burns through his Glagolitic Mass, composed in 1926. It could be a dream of pan-Slavism, a quasi-mystical belief in the underlying unity of the Slavic peoples, which was in the air at the time.

The fact that the piece sets the Catholic liturgy in a form of Old Church Slavonic lends weight to that idea. But the wildness of the music points to something else, a belief in pagan spirits of the countryside. Janáček hinted at that interpretation when he said the piece should be performed in the open air, rather than in church. This Agnus Dei to me evokes snow-covered woods standing in total silence under a starry sky.